Australia is in violation of “its obligations under international human rights and humanitarian laws, including by outsourcing offshore processing of refugee claims, transgressing non-refoulement obligations and separating families,” claimed CEDAW in Geneva earlier this month.
Assistant Secretary in the Department of Home Affairs, Steven Mcglynn, told the Committee, “We take our international obligations incredibly seriously.” But Committee members were not convinced. They drew on the concerns of other UN agencies that have stated Australia is not meeting its obligations under international law.
Exposed to rape, sexual abuse and physical harm, perpetrated with impunity, by security guards, service providers ...
The Committee’s Rapporteur for Australia, Patricia Schulz, asked if the government would renounce offshore processing on Nauru “in view of the lack of protection you can give to the human rights of the women and girls who are processed there.”
In their report, the Committee stated that women seeking asylum in Australia are “exposed to rape, sexual abuse and physical harm, perpetrated with impunity, by security guards, service providers, refugees and asylum seekers and by the local community in Nauru, and that women victims remain without access to justice.” Neither the processing facility in Nauru, nor the local police have the capacity to investigate or prosecute such abuses.
The Committee found that, despite the fact that Australia’s immigration facilities were outside our geographic territory, the government still had an obligation to uphold the Convention and provide protection from sexual and gender-based violence to those who were seeking asylum.
The international community was outraged when one asylum seeker who had suffered such abuse was denied access to a safe and legal abortion after discovering her abuser had impregnated her. Australia’s own Federal Court found it owed women like her a duty of care.
Access to sexual and reproductive health care is enshrined in the Convention and the Committee found Australia had not met its obligations to ensure the provision of such services to women in Nauru who were seeking asylum.
The Committee called on the government to “guarantee that all refugee and asylum-seeking women and girls … have access to comprehensive, adequate and accessible sexual and reproductive health services and information… including to emergency contraception and abortion services.”
Civil society organisations met with members of the committee before they questioned the government and provided written briefs on the issues covered by the Convention.
The Queer Sisterhood Project told the Committee, “LGBTI women in forced displacement suffer targeted abuse as a direct result of their diverse sexual orientation or gender identity.” Australia’s immigration regime has suffered particular criticism on how it treats the claims of LGBTQI people. The overwhelming number of people in offshore migration facilities come from countries in which homosexuality is in some way criminalised.
The report of the Committee calls on the government to fully reinstate the SSRS program that provides settlement support services to asylum seekers while their claims are processed by the immigration department. They called out the department for unreasonably slow processing times and said that cuts to this program “will hit women with children particularly hard, exposing them to homelessness and exploitative conditions.”
While the Committee also called for changes to Australia’s migration policy to allow for environmental refugees from small island states in our region effected by climate change, they remained strong in their overall criticism of Australia’s refugee and asylum-seeking processes.
Susan Hutchinson is a freelance contributor to The Feed. She is a PhD scholar at the ANU; a member of the Australian Civil Society Coalition on Women, Peace and Security; and an architect of the Prosecute Don’t Perpetuate campaign.
